Margaret Hamilton, NASA’s lead developer for Apollo program, stands next to all the code she wrote by hand that took humanity to the moon in 1969
Margaret Hamilton, NASA’s lead developer for Apollo program, stands next to all the code she wrote by hand that took humanity to the moon in 1969
She wrote code without stack overflow for her job, and the code worked as intended. That alone is worthy of respect.
I don’t want to diminish her awesome in any way at all because she’s a superstar.
However, while she didn’t have stack overflow she did have direct access to the people that built the hardware and the interpreter.
I think the “by hand” part would be the biggest disadvantage - you can’t just re-run something n times while inserting console.log(‘here’) at different places to figure out what’s going on.
The code is also remarkably far simpler than people expected. It’s mostly pointing, timing and adjusting. User interaction was minimal and they weren’t using unknown or hard to memorize apis from multiple different people and groups (All of which would be decided on long before this point. NASA doesn’t fuck around with documentation. Look up their practices).
The feat of getting to the moon is incredible, the feat only 8 people wrote the code is amazing, the fact the computer would be unusable in the modern world and was outdated by the 80s really shows.
But the actual code isn’t that complex (mostly because it couldn’t be, and shouldn’t be) and was written in assembly.
But it’s still damn awesome, I wish they focused on that instead of the misinformation in the title.